Never fear, Bloody Streaming Roulette is here! Last week, I was able to get back to my winning ways. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead was a gory riot that I very much enjoyed. Boils and ghouls, I have hit a milestone with The Horror Syndicate. The article you are currently reading is my 100th piece! GO ME! Since you have put up with me for so long and still come back screaming for more, I hope the next 100 articles will be just as much fun. Okay enough sentiment. Let’s get back to it!
SPIN THAT SHIT!
Preservation (2014)
Wit and Mike Neary are a young married couple looking to get away for a relaxing time of camping and hunting. Mike’s military veteran brother Sean tags along as the third wheel, much to the chagrin of Wit. Everything goes great the first day. They bag a doe and go for a quick dip in a parasite infested pond. Great times. They settle in for the night. When they wake the next day, they find all of their supplies are missing and all three have crudely drawn X’s marked on their foreheads. We soon find out the Neary’s have gone from hunters to the hunted. As they are being stalked by three masked figures. Without anything to protect themselves with except for the landscape, can the Neary’s make it out alive?
“A bear will kill to defend itself and a lion will kill when it’s hungry. Man is the only animal that kills for fun.”
As you can tell from the brief synopsis, this is not breaking any new ground in the genre. A murderous cat and mouse game has been done many times before. Does Preservation offer anything to set itself apart from its predecessors? Not really. The acting was actually good, but very over the top. With a generic script such as this, it was heavily-loaded with cliché quotes as the one above. The dialogue was too smooth, almost like they perfected it so well in pre-production that when they went to actually film it, it felt like the actors were just going through the motions. This whole film felt like a cliché. The lack of fear and tension was bothersome. The lack of gore and blood was a tad bothersome as well. Everything about this film felt light-hearted. There was no true sense of urgency from the actors.
The weird thing is, it wasn’t a bad movie, but it wasn’t a good movie either. It was well done. Production, cinematography, music was all good. Preservation is a mere shadow of its predecessors, offering nothing really original to the genre. Even with the interesting twist on the stereotypical backwoods killer, it still wasn’t enough to save this film. As with all my BSR adventures, I go into each film open-minded. But unfortunately, I was ready for the film to be over before it was.
Not the way I wanted my 100th article to go. But this is exactly why I came up with Bloody Streaming Roulette boils and ghouls. To save you from lackluster genre efforts such as this. All negatives aside, it was an okay movie. Just not good enough for you to take an hour and a half out of your busy day.
IMDb: 4.7/10
ZombiSurvivor: 4.8/10
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STAY SCARED!
-ZS
